A Demon in the Lab

Something heavy was crushing my head, turning every ounce of my brain into a gooey jelly liquid. In another word, I got a massive headache as soon as I woke up. What’s worse was the searing pain coming from my left neck.

As soon as that superstar slash werewolf slash vampire slash a being that cannot be tolerated with science and facts went away, I spent ten minutes staring at my plasma TV screen. I stared at the black nothingness that reflected myself looking like a lost lamb.

I could not make sense of anything! I wanted so bad for that night to be a dream or a hallucination. Yes, I would take it better as a hallucination than reality. Because I was not ready to shed the logic I had been building my world around with.

But the pain on my neck was screaming to my brain that everything was real. And when I checked on the mirror that night, the shape and size of the bite looked exactly like how a bat-like creature would.

Well, a logical explanation would entail that a bat did come to my room and sucked the hell out of me… then I looked at my unzipped pants. Only then I got mixed feelings. For one, I did not want what had happened to be real. Yet two, if it was not real then I had to come to terms with my subconscious being a nymphomaniac who hallucinate about paranormal beings almost raping me.

Both options seemed ugly.

So, that night, I decided that the best decision to do was to take a shower and sleep on it.

Bad mistake.

I should have patched the wound first before going to sleep. But as soon as my body touched my bed, my eyelids drooped pretty instantly. I was that tired from the adrenaline rush I had and from fighting my own logic.

And that caused me to pay in the morning with swollen red skin and a stiff neck with blazing pain. The blood had stopped and I could see some skin had come together. A little blood clotting in action by the amazingly underappreciated body organs; platelets and thromboplastin.

Am I boring you with some medical jargon? Oh, well.

I got to my bathroom and applied some ointment on the wound. My skin was red and there were two dark dots along with teeth marks around it. Luckily, he did not yank my skin nor meat, so I would not have to stitch anything. But on the parts where his fangs did dig in, the cut was deep and again, it was hella painful. So, I grabbed my surgical kit stashed on the upper cupboard of my bathroom mirror. I took out a small syringe, drew out some spare lidocaine –an anesthetic, and injected it near my wound.

I bought the surgical kit to practice my basic surgical skill. Since I was not a clinical student yet, I haven’t done my rotation in the hospital. But we were taught some basic skills like injecting various liquids into various body parts and how to stitch up wounds. Thus a lot of pre-clinical medical students would buy surgical kits and practice on their own. Like people say practice makes perfect.

Carefully, I injected to near my wound with a forty-five-degree angle from the skin. I used the fan technique to spread the anesthetic across my wound. Since the scars were small, I did not use much of the liquid less I wanted myself unable to feel my own neck for the whole day. I just needed enough to subdue the pain.

Then I drank an anti-inflammatory pill to reduce the swelling and applied an antiseptic liquid on it before plastering it. After it was done, I rinsed my body and got dressed. Black shirt, black pants with a red scarf around my neck to hide the wound. And only then I remembered that I gave my lab coat to cover the superstar’s manhood.

*Shit.*

I grabbed my purse and walked out of the door. The morning sun was greeting me warmly as I looked around to find my lab coat. I even looked down from the balcony to see if my lab coat was being thrown off to the street when… um… when he turned into a werewolf and jumped.

But I could not find my lab coat anywhere. In the end, I had to grab my other lab coat –we always have spare lab coats –and went off to my research institution.

As I did not want the risk to bump with the superstar again, I made sure that I walked super early. By doing that, I had to sacrifice having my daily morning coffee from Starcups. Nonetheless, it was much better than seeing him again.

I managed to arrive at Reagan Hope Hospital and Research Institute at exactly 7 am. The front door had just been opened and I waltzed into the research lounge.

Since I had spare time, I visited the laboratory next to the lounge. That day, Marc was going to teach us how to write the report for the blood work of the patients and how to test the effectiveness of the drugs on each patient using biomarkers. Biomarkers are biological conditions in the body that can be markers of certain activities in the body, it can either be proteins, hormones, even ions, and lots more. Some of the biomarkers could only be seen through electron microscopes as they were very small.

Okay, now you can forget whatever I just explained to you about my research. It did not help the progress of the story whatsoever. I just wanted to put it there so you would believe that I was actually smart. I was.

Anyway, I made sure to get the knack of operating the electron microscope because it could be tricky to use. I also reread how to read the spectrophotometry for this study. And some other techniques that I am sure you would not care to know. With my goggles, gloves, and lab coat on, I looked like a proper scientist. Even though I was only there to consolidate my knowledge so that when Marc teaches us, I could be the ace of his volunteers.

I was in my zone. Reading and taking notes while observing the equipment. When suddenly I felt hot air was blown on the back of my neck. I gasped and turned around, almost knocking down a beaker glass from the table.

“Hello there, pretty little thing,” said a husky and deep voice.

My eyes widened to see a man standing in front of me. Not just any man, but a hot brooding man. And that was not all.

It was the man in black in my hallucination. The one who kept on banging on my window and had… I was sure he had yellow eyes in my hallucination. Yet the man who was standing before me in the laboratory had dark eyes.

He wore a white T-shirt with ripped black jeans and a black leather studded jacket. He looked like a biker guy with his tousled curly hair and trimmed facial hair.

If Renald Davis looked like a pretty boy, this man looked like a real man. Masculine and tall. Even I could almost outline his pecks through his thin cloth.

“H– how did you get here?” I looked at the door of the laboratory. No one was supposed to be able to enter without scanning their name tags. “You’re not supposed to be here, Sir.”

“Why not?”

“This is the research area. If you’re here to visit someone you’re on the wrong side of the building.”

He took a step forward as I took a step back. My back touched the table behind me. I had nowhere else to go.

“I’m here to visit you,” he said in a low tone. I swore I saw his eyes flashed yellow for a second.

He sniffed the air near my neck a couple of times. Then he frowned. “He fucking bit you,” the man growled.

“What?” How did this strange –but gorgeous –man know that I was bitten the day before?

“Who are you?” My voice was cautious. I was a little bit scared that he would say something crazy like a ‘hybrid’ again.

It was worse than that.

“I’m a demon,” he said it like it was normal, “Care to make a deal with the devil?” He smirked devilishly.

And I was sure my life seemed to be sucked into a hellish spiral from then on.